At 120 he needed the flashlight. Sunlight still penetrated, but it was attenuated, dim, alien in this other world of the deep. Checking his pressure gauge, he saw he was using up air ten times faster than in shallower water because the air compressed too. The volume that would fill your lungs at the surface was crushed to the size of a golf ball at this depth.
Using the light to illuminate the air bubbles that rose like crystal branches from their mouths, he swam toward the other divers. Drawing closer, he saw the silhouette of something unnaturally regular near where they hung in the water. From it rose a single orange line from the marker buoy that the young police divers had rigged up after they had stumbled across it.
Refraction made everything look bigger than it was, but it would be big anyway, even on the surface. He’d checked with brochures; a four-horsepower electric motor was needed to crush bones the size of the human pelvis, and the funnel that fed them to the grinding wheels had to be over twelve inches in diameter at the narrowest point. With a heavy motor and a large funnel, a cast-iron base to tolerate the vibration and a wide aperture near the bottom out of which the mince poured, the machine stood over four feet off the ground and weighed more than four hundred pounds. Lying diagonally in the gravel, it loomed out of the seabed with the two divers hanging near it. The funnel doubled the height of the machine.
The divers held index fingers against thumbs, questioning. Chan made the same sign back: I’m okay. He swam to the funnel, looked in. All the fish were gone, having feasted on whatever had remained in the machine. He tapped the funnel. The steel gave off a watery echo. Something moved. An eel shot out of the funnel, flashed toward Chan’s face; a miniature monster with silent screaming jaws, it diverted at the last instant. Chan’s heart raced, using precious air. He caught the concerned look behind the masks of his two colleagues. He showed an index finger against a thumb again. They nodded slowly.
The divers turned their attention to the mincer. They had brought down with them two heavy-duty nylon ropes with stainless steel hooks that were capable of being snapped closed at the ends. The ropes were fixed at the surface to the gantry raft. Chan watched them for a moment while they looked for somewhere to attach the hooks. Then he held out his left arm at eye level, grasped his left wrist with his right hand, started to swim north six degrees east.
It was a technique taught at advanced level: In still water every swimmer proceeded almost exactly the same distance for each flip of his fins. Chan knew that for thirty-three complete flips he covered a distance of twenty-one feet. After three complete fin strokes he was out of sight of the two divers. He remained at the bottom, following the direction that the boat must have taken. He gave himself ten minutes, too long for the amount of air he had left but sufficient if he used the spare tank dangling from the bottom of the gantry. Returning to the boat would be simple; he would ascend using the ropes they were attaching to the mincer or the two anchor lines that moored the gantry raft, whichever he saw first. He kept his eye on the compass, continued to swim north six degrees east, following a Chinese hunch.
He didn’t know why every time he dived he had the same thought as though it lurked like a shark waiting to ambush him:
Charlie Chan, this is your mind.
Just like the mind, the ocean bed fell away under him all of a sudden, leaving a void.
He hung at 120 feet about a yard beyond the submarine cliff edge, looking down into a fertile valley. With his torch he illuminated a steep slope on which purple coral grew. Rainbow fish darted among the coral. Farther down, in the gloom, large shapes moved. Sharks were common in these waters, but their dangers were much exaggerated. More pressing was the diminishing air supply. The needle was creeping into the red zone. He was moving his light in one last farewell arc when he saw it jammed half way down the cliff against a gray coral growth: a large steel traveling chest of the kind sold in the China Products shops in Hong Kong. A corner was badly crumpled, and much of the paint had been scraped off by the slide down the cliff. He calculated. It would take only minutes to
get to the fifteen-feet level where the spare air tank hung. True, it was bad practice to leave his companions to sound the alarm for him, but evidence was evidence. He exhaled, dived downward and accelerated with a couple of fin thrusts. As he reached the trunk, the needle on his air gauge moved into the danger zone.
The trunk was not locked but tied with nylon rope. Bright green nylon rope, he noted. Then, when he checked his depth gauge, his heartbeat doubled. Without noticing he had descended to 150 feet, 10 more feet than was permitted for recreational divers. To avoid the bends, he must ascend slowly and wait at specific depths, although he could not remember which. The problem was that he did not have enough air. The needle on the air gauge was in the middle of the red zone. At this depth he had no more than a minute. Panic worked his lungs, using up more air.
Charlie Chan, fool, trapped in his own mind.
So what was new?
A hundred feet seemed like a good number to pause at. He waited at this depth until the needle struck the black pin at the end of the danger zone, at which point there was nothing left in the tank to suck at. With the last of the air in his lungs he swam upward, exhaling as gently as he could.
Turning, he saw two ropes suspended in the sea about ten yards to his right. He swam toward them. Remembering the golden rule, Never hold your breath, he tore open the buckle on his weight belt, let it drop. Exhaling freely now, he ascended the ropes like a cork. The ropes converged near the spare tank hanging from the boat. By the time he arrived his lungs were screaming; he was at the fatal point of sucking in water. For the split second it took for the mind to process the thought he paused on the brink of dissolving this misfit Charlie Chan in the vast and bitter sea, to have done with his irritating company once and for all. Then he grabbed the mouthpiece to the spare tank and gorged on air, the primal food.
He hung there fifteen feet below the friendly hull basking in sea-filtered sunlight, flooding his starved blood with air. Shock trembled his hands. Oxygen narcosis lightened his head. Underwater he could not stop laughing. Terror had cracked a carapace of anger he’d been
carrying for twenty-three years. Whom did he think he was kidding? He loved air, light, life.
He was thinking of Moira when the others joined him. They saw the trembling in his limbs. Systematically they checked him: air tank empty; weight belt missing; heart still racing. The fixed needle on his depth gauge showed that he’d descended to 151 feet. Behavior consistent with hysteria.
They brought down a full tank of air, made him stay an extra forty minutes to burn off nitrogen. When they finally hauled him to the surface, all Chan could do was cough. He lay on the deck spluttering in frustration. He was lucky not to choke to death on old tobacco. He tried to stand up, but they kept him down, allowing him to sit only. When he finally managed to explain about the trunk, Higgins was unimpressed.
“You shouldn’t smoke,” he said.
Higgins called for help on the radio. He insisted Chan go back to Sai Kung on the second launch that was sent out from Tolo Harbor. If he developed signs of the bends, he would need to be airlifted to Hong Kong Island, where the Royal Navy had a decompression chamber.
Higgins promised that as soon as they had hauled up the mincer, they would use the launch to move the gantry exactly sixty-three feet, or ninety-six fin strokes, north six degrees east. Less than fifty yards from the PRC border. The divers would go down again to retrieve the trunk.
“Have you ever seen anyone with the bends?” Higgins said. “It’s distilled agony. One twinge in any joint, even your little finger, and you go into the decompression chamber. You’ll thank me.” He nodded to the two medics who helped Chan onto the other launch. “No point killing yourself over a few murders,” he called out as Chan went below.
Could the bends be worse than English humor? Chan reached for a cigarette. At least he’d be able to make the date with Moira. He had to admit he was looking forward to seeing her.
22
T
hat night Chan wore a white linen suit, an Italian silk tie, brown Italian leather shoes, a silk shirt he’d had made in Hong Kong. Moira wore clothes she’d bought that day: long silk dress, beige with faint mauve stripes; high heels; a new bra. She wore exactly the right amount of lipstick and mascara, but what Chan liked most was the perfume. It was faint, sophisticated, mature. Maturity was a curious thing. Sandra, his ex-wife, had had few vices, worn no makeup, committed no crimes, never drunk alcohol. And he had never fully trusted her. Moira was a thief and a liar, and he would not have been afraid to share his blackest secret with her.
In the womb of trust libido thrived. Sitting next to her in the back of the taxi, he slid his hand between the folds of her dress, tried to reach her nipples but was thwarted by the firm new bra.
Moira took his hand out, held it.
“What happened to you today?”
“Nothing.”
“Just a scratch?”
“What’s that?”
“Something we say in the States, you know, like when a movie hero gets shot to pieces by the baddies and wanders into the saloon with blood pouring from twenty different holes in his body and the sheriff says, ‘What happened to you?’ and the hero says, ‘Oh, it’s just a scratch.’ I mean, why does the blood drain periodically from your face when you remember whatever it is you remember and
why is your usual nervous twitch magnified by a factor of twenty and why are you suddenly as horny as a pubescent kid?”
Chan thought it over. Personal directness was not part of Chinese culture. He had to work at it to do better. “Because I nearly killed myself today and I’m so damned glad to be alive if I hadn’t promised to take you out for dinner, I’d be at home fucking you to death.”
Moira looked at the driver’s reflection in the mirror. He didn’t look as if he spoke English.
“We could always turn around and go back. I mean, I’ve got only one more day here, and I would hate to waste even a couple of hours—”
Chan squeezed her hand. “I’m also hungry, need a drink and want to look at you across a plate of noodles.”
“That’s erotic for you?”
“No, just familiar. Every really good date I ever had started off with noodles.”
“Sorry if we’ve been putting the cart before the horse.”
The taxi climbed from Central up Garden Road to Magazine Gap. Apart from Government House, a white colonial mansion crouching under apartment blocks at every corner, there was nothing left of the Hong Kong Chan had known as a kid. No traditional two-story flat-fronted Chinese houses with yellow walls and green shutters; no British barracks with pillared terraces, mosquito netting and red-faced chaps reading
The Times
with their feet up and sipping a gin and tonic; no Chinese girls in cheongsams, the long silk dress with splits up to the thigh; no compradors; no taipans; no rickshaws. Sometimes he wondered if he really did remember that old world from his youth or had merely read about it. But it had all happened there on the very slopes where five hundred apartment blocks now soared, each one reaching over the other for a view of the harbor. Harbor views could add a premium of 50 percent to the retail value of a flat; it was a cityscape sprung from a pocket calculator. Yet at night it was beautiful.
At the junction with Magazine Gap Road they turned and climbed more steeply. The driver switched off the air conditioning in favor of more power, Chan opened the window. They were just above the pollution level. Moira breathed deeply, moaned.
“It’s so balmy. In exactly thirty hours I’m not gonna believe this ever happened.”
On the flat saddle under Victoria Peak the driver switched the air conditioning back on. At the Peak Café they were shown to the outdoor table Chan had booked; it was small, round and made of marble from the Philippines. Chan ordered champagne. It wasn’t a real Chinese restaurant at all, although in an earlier incarnation it had been a teahouse for coolies who had dragged Englishmen and women up the ancient paths in sedan chairs. An American entrepreneur had renovated it into a chic international café with international prices and one of the best views in the world.
Moira took it in with a long, slow sweep. “Wow! Is this how Hong Kong detectives spend their spare time?”
Chan screwed his eyes to slits: “Velly old Chinese proverb: Too much workee make Wong dull boy.”
Moira’s eyes sparkled through the meal while Chan ate noodles with dumplings and she ate smoked salmon with warm nan and pesto, washed down with a bottle of Australian white wine between them. Chan wanted to ask if she needed more alcohol but didn’t. He knew she knew he was waiting.
He paid the bill and led her to the footpath that circles the Peak and is walked at least once by everyone who visits the territory. They began at the harbor side. Two thousand feet below a man-made constellation sent light skyward in a million different clusters, a macrofax for extraterrestrials:
This is wealth.
The show lasted for about a mile, then began diminishing as the path bent around to the less developed side of the island. He found a bench with a view over Pok Fu Lam, held her hand while they sat down.
Moira gripped his palm. “So, is this my moment?”
“I guess.”
She cleared her throat. “I brought some pictures. Telling stories is easier for me with visual backup. Here’s the first.”
She took some photographs out of her handbag, gave him one. It showed a young blond female cadet in the blue uniform of the New York Police Department. He noted the chiseled Irish jaw, the determined posture, the womanly shape despite the ugly uniform.
“And this is me at about the same time out of uniform.”
She was in an evening dress that reached halfway down her thigh and plunged between her full and youthful breasts.
“Great tits,” Chan said, practicing directness.
“Dad spoiled me. He said I could have any man I wanted. Well, girls who can have any man they want generally pick the wrong one. Of all the guys chasing me in the department I picked Mario. He was a captain, the only one who hadn’t been married before, or wasn’t still, but that’s not why I chose him. I fell for him like—oh, like all serious girls fall sooner or later. Can I have one of your cigarettes?”